Welcome

I've been playing on and off for a decade after being introduced by a friend.

I played regularly for a few years during the poker boom and had a decent record at the micros, particularly Rush and Zoom No Limit Hold'em games (here's one of my graphs).

Around 2012 I began a new career which involved immersing myself completely in study in my spare time, so I had little to no time for poker. However recently this burden has eased and so I have been gradually dipping back in.

I'm an amateur player who still hopes to some day beat the rake.

Tuesday, 26 October 2010

Personal Challenge, and a Little on Ranges

Well, I'm really not playing much at the moment, for various reasons. Particularly work being pretty rubbish and leading to a state of mind where I don't want to grind. However, by the new year Id like to play 100k or more hands of 25NL FR Rush. This is so that I can objectively assess my game at this new level. If I'm winning, great - that should be a nice new year bonus. If not, I can decide what I should do next to better myself as a poker player enough to beat what should be a very beatable micro stakes playing field. So I'm going to document those hands in this blog. I am going to break the 100k hands into 50 X 2k hand blocks that I will need to play in one sitting (each 2k). Basically while I may have a few small 30-60 minute sessions, the challenge sessions must comprise of a 2k hand sitting and to give credibility to them I will post before I begin a block and also a graph once I have done. This will encourage me to play my best. So the 50 session challenge begins now, and Ill play the first session in the next couple of days.

Recently I have learned about range defence; that in order to prevent exploitation in a situation we cannot fold too much and thus allow opponents to profitably bet any two cards. But on the flip side, there are plenty of situations where our range differs from our opponents significantly in terms of equity. In certain spots trying to defend our range would lose us more money than before because our opponent can just play very aggressively knowing that in the long run he has a big equity edge. The point of this is that the scale of our range defence should be guided by the strength of our range versus villains. This is really best explained by example. In an extreme case, it is folded to us in the small blind. We raise as a steal and our opponent calls. Suppose we have played a million hands against this player and he has folded 95% of the time to small blind steals. Knowing how much he folds, our range is any two cards. Now poker stove tells me that our equity against his calling range is only 27%. Now we are very exploitable if we check fold every time we are called. We are not defending our range enough, so villain can just bet every single time we check. But if we fight back and try and defend, we are putting money in consistently as an underdog and this is bad. In conclusion, if our range does very well against our opponents, we should always give him HELL because the equity allows us this pleasure. If we have neutral equity, we should not fold too easily but equally not become outrageously aggressive unless villain is weak and folds too much. If our equity is very poor we should only continue when we have decent or better equity - so in the example check folding without at least a good draw is correct. Hope some of this made sense, it does to me lol! GL